Important Notice

Subodh Gupta’s body of work draws much of its inspiration from India’s current socio-economic upheavals, and the multi-directional migrations of goods, services, and people that they have resulted in. In his large format canvases, the artist playfully meditates on both the desirable and adverse dimensions of globalization, and particularly on their dualistic effect on India’s burgeoning middle-class. Gupta’s engagement with these dichotomies is... Subodh Gupta’s body of work draws much of its inspiration from India’s current socio-economic upheavals, and the multi-directional migrations of goods, services, and people that they have resulted in. In his large format canvases, the artist playfully meditates on both the desirable and adverse dimensions of globalization, and particularly on their dualistic effect on India’s burgeoning middle-class. Gupta’s engagement with these dichotomies is partly the result of his own move from semi-rural Bihar to the hyper-urban capital city of Delhi, and his personal experiences experimenting with his newfound social, geographic and economic mobility.

In this monumental 2004 canvas, the artist tackles the phenomenon of relocation, or the physical mobility that results from economic growth and class mobility. Here, a man, either arriving or departing, holds firmly onto a luggage-cart loaded with boxes straining against their ropes outside the airport. Though this may appear to be an ‘everyday’ scene, Gupta bestows each element of the painting with symbolic value and multiple layers of meaning. On this canvas, even the ‘Ambassador’ taxi, ubiquitous in India over several decades, partially visible at the left, becomes emblematic of migration, and the aspirations and disappointments that go hand-in-hand with it. Personal insecurities are juxtaposed against the quest for materialistic advancement, and family and home are reduced to as many personal effects as fit in one’s luggage.

Subodh Gupta’s works “portray objects and images of indecisive moments and cultural fluctuations.” This work, like the artist’s 2003 series of canvases, Saat Samundar par (Across the Seven Seas), captures “a mid-migratory point, the no-man’s-land that is the airport today…An interstitial point both in space and time, the airport signifies both exhilaration and anxiety, the tedious boredom that accompanies the most extreme physical dislocation.” It is no longer a sphere of the privileged, but a hub of mass movement where urban and rural collide, and thus “a point of extreme vulnerability” (Peter Nagy, “Transitory Indecisions and Fluctuating Moments”, Subodh Gupta, Nature Morte and Sakshi Art Gallery, 2006, p. 6).

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